Roy Gutman is a Sarajevan - official

Sarajevo has made Roy Gutman an honorary citizen and awarded him the key to the city to honour his reporting on the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia during the 1992-1995 war.

Gutman, 66, a Reuters correspondent in Bonn, Vienna, Belgrade, London and Washington from 1971 to 1980, received the award from Sarajevo mayor Alija Behman in the Bosnian capital at a televised ceremony on 6 April, 65th anniversary of the city's liberation after World War II.

“It’s a great, completely unexpected honour,” said Gutman, pictured at the ceremony.

The citation, approved unanimously by Sarajevo city council in mid-March, said "The investigative work of Roy Gutman had a decisive impact on directing American and world attention to wartime events in Bosnia and Herzegovina." It "provided additional arguments for (international) intervention and establishing peace in the region".

The inscription accompanying the key said: "The citizens of Sarajevo hereby express their respect and gratitude" for Gutman's "contribution to the truth and the facts about the events of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and its capital city in the period of 1992-1995."

At the time Gutman was Newsday's European correspondent. He was the first reporter to expose a network of concentration camps run by Bosnian Serbs, where mostly Muslim civilians were held, beaten, starved and often killed. His reporting led to the closure of some of the worst camps, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that 5,000 to 6,000 lives were saved.

He also reported on state-organised deportation of whole villages, the systematic rape of young Bosnian women, the widespread destruction of the culture and the involvement of top Bosnian Serb officials in the alleged crimes. Many of those identified in his stories as responsible for the assault on civilians have been sentenced by the UN-sponsored International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague, where Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic is on trial.

Gutman's war reporting from Bosnia won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. He is the recipient of numerous other journalism awards. He became foreign editor of McClatchy Newspapers in December 2006 and is chairman of the Washington-based Crimes of War Project, a collaboration of journalists, lawyers and scholars dedicated to raising public awareness of the laws of war. ■